Anthós
Volume 6 | Issue 1
Article 4
2014
Américo Castro and His Idea of Saint James: The Historiographical
Legacy
Daniel Blanchard
Portland State University
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Blanchard, Daniel (2014) "Américo Castro and His Idea of Saint James: The Historiographical Legacy," Anthós: Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 4.
10.15760/anthos.2014.51
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Daniel Blanchard
Américo Castro and His Idea of Saint James: The
Historiographical Legacy
Daniel W. Blanchard
This essay aims in essence to echo what the late great Hispanist
Albert A. Sicroff suggested in an article published over forty years
ago, in the winter preceding Américo Castro's death. Sicroff said of
Castro, "Despite his critics, he has made formidable contributions
toward understanding what went on within that Spanish morada vital
to produce some of the most magnificent expressions of human
existence the world has known."i Indeed, Castro faced many critics as
he flourished as one of the twentieth century's most prestigious
scholars of Spanish history and culture. Yet his critics, as Sicroff has
explained, often demonstrated a misunderstanding of the very
concepts they rejected, resorting to oversimplified versions of Castro's
thought, "full of distortions and omissions."ii While Sicroff addressed
a body of criticism centered in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it is
unfortunate to find that historians of the past half-century have
changed very little in their approach to Castro's scholarship.
The polemical debate surrounding Spanish national identity that
had a significant impact on Castro, and to which some critics believe
he himself contributed in his most well-known works, has largely
faded into the abyss of Franco-era Spain. While the debate lingered
for some time in the late-seventies and eighties, historiographers have
explained it lost its raison d'etre shortly after Franco's death in 1975,
and thereafter Spain's entrance into the European Community (now
European Union) in 1986.iii The tendency of the historiography of the
last half-century has been to filter Castro's ideas through this polemic
on Spanish national character without paying serious attention to the
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nuances of his historical analyses. To designate Castro simply as a
polemicist oriented against Franco's Spain, however, is to ignore the
value of the theoretical elements composing his broader conception of
Spanish history. Moreover it is hypocritical to discredit the value of
Castro's contributions to the study of Spain, due to their supposed
rhetorical distortions of historicity, when many present-day historians
operate within similar, if not exactly the same, theoretical
frameworks.
Castro introduced his idea of Saint James in his 1948 text España
en su historia. He revised the text three times, producing new editions
in 1954, renamed La realidad histórica de España and translated as
The Structure of Spanish History by Edmund L. King with Castro's
close supervision, and again revised in 1962. These reworked editions
integrated new chapters and further defenses of Castro's historical
philosophy into the narrative of the original text. While Castro made
these additions, his conception of Saint James remained the same.
José Rubia Barcia noted, "For Don Américo, Santiago is not of
Galicia, but of Spain, and although he deletes, adds and revises some
chapters in the successive editions of España en su historia, he
always includes, with slight modifications, the chapters on Santiago
as the central and main key for the understanding of Spanish
history."iv Furthermore Castro published a defense of his idea of the
Saint in his 1958 text Santiago de España, in which he made clear
that the Saint was "integrated into the vital entity of Spain."v This
essay elucidates what exactly Castro means by this claim. Rather than
apprehending Castro's idea of Saint James in a context external to his
own philosophy of history, however, the present essay clarifies how
the Saint functions within it. To Castro the Saint is not a happening,
isolated in the context of its historical place. It is integrated into the
very living experience of Spanishness. From this exercise it can be
gleaned that Castro's idea of Saint James is qualified within his own
philosophy of history, that the Saint functions accordingly to, and is a
product of, the historical process of Spain's self-fashioning.
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Daniel Blanchard
Castro informs his reader early in The Structure of Spanish
History that his unique method of viewing history cannot be grasped
solely by logical reason.vi Therefore Saint James in Castro's view is an
historical phenomenon that may make little sense to the reader
without first considering the theoretical framework within which the
idea operates. The first and most fundamental to grasp is the idea that
Spain is constituted of a vital essence, made up by the collective
belief of a people, and reflected in its cultural productions. "Spain was
a faith, a belief," says Castro, "fed by life and by death, by heaven and
by earth."vii Castro gives context to such an abstraction by examining
the works of twentieth-century philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who
wrote of the Spanish people's vital connection between the empirical
and spiritual conditions of life. Unamuno described Spain as a land
under heaven, full of heaven—a body—and from the body, the idea
that Spain has a soul.viii Castro finds throbbing in Unamuno's lyricism
"ten centuries of yearning existence."ix Unamuno expresses, for
Castro, an existential crisis that is intrinsic to Spain, what Castro calls
its "primordial phenomenon."x Spain has faced an initial and constant
problem since the Middle Ages, a problem of "insecurity and anguish
concerning its own existence, its uncertainty, its living in a state of
alarm caused by doubt."xi Effectively Castro's philosophy of history is
to take up this existential crisis in the context of historical inquiry. In
doing so he aims not only to preserve, but also accurately to represent
the vital essence of Spanishness.
Castro uses the basis of existential philosophy to coin his own
terms, composing an historical structure that accommodates his
unique way of viewing history. These terms materialize from the
basic notion that, for Castro, "historical life consists in an inner
trajectory or process in which external motivations acquire form and
reality; that is, they are converted into deeds and events that have a
meaning."xii In other words, the intellectual, societal, and even
geographical environment of an historical agent, or "subject-agent" in
Castro's terms, determine the agent's existence. This existence is
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reflected in the agent's actions and productions. As deeds reflect the
existential condition of the agent, the "inwardness" or "peculiar
physiognomy of a people," they also define the historical form and
reality of a people.xiii Thus deeds carry meaning on several levels for
Castro. On the one hand they determine the mode of life, what Castro
terms the "dwelling place of life" (morada vital), which is the way an
agent is perceived in its history as having existed on account of its
actions.xiv On the other hand deeds represent "living structure," or
vividura.xv Living structure reflects the "mode according to which"
the agent operates, the equivalent of that reflexive quality mentioned
above in which environmental circumstances are revealed according
to the agent's deeds. Morada vital and vividura are the dialectical
essences that, for Castro, activate historical inquiry, enabling a critical
process that reveals to the historian the actual existential condition of
a people. Naturally Castro viewed this method as distancing the
historian from the kind of deterministic biases that informed his
predecessors, because the actual historical agent can be understood
according to its own environmental circumstances, rather than the
value-laden judgments of the historian themself.
Castro applies the dialectic of morada vital and vividura to the
existential condition of the Iberian peoples in the Middle Ages. By
examining the dialectic across the Peninsula's dominant religious
groups, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, Castro determines that their
cultural traditions suffused with one another significantly. This
cultural interplay, what Castro terms "living togetherness," or
convivencia, effectively amounted to a pluralistic Iberian society. For
Castro the process of convivencia is an unrelenting, omnipresent
dialectic between cultures. The process entails an interplay that is not
limited to peacetime exchange. On the contrary, in many cases the
interplay becomes most pronounced through deeds of violence, as is
especially apparent in the emergence of the Hispanicized Christians of
northwestern Iberia in the eighth and ninth centuries.
54
Daniel Blanchard
It is in the eighth and ninth centuries that Castro demonstrates
that the Christians living along the strip of territory along the Atlantic
in northern Iberia, especially the most isolated Galicians in the
Northwest, began to take on their peculiarly Spanish vividura. Cut off
from their Visigothic roots, the Christians of northern Spain began to
adapt to their new environmental circumstances, which entailed an
abundance of interaction with the Muslims that had conquered
Visigothic Spain in the early-eighth century. From these interactions
Christians gleaned a "host of things—material and human—created
by the Moors."xvi This process of convivencia eventually yielded
medieval Spain, "the result of the combination of an attitude of
submission and wonder in the face of a culturally superior enemy and
of the effort to overcome this very position of inferiority."xvii As the
passage suggests, Castro argued that the Spanish had acculturated
both peaceful and militant practices from the Muslims, on account of
which their vividura began to reflect their disposition in the form of
cultural production.
Castro qualifies his philosophy of history via this theoretical
framework of "living-togetherness," what is in itself determined by
"the dwelling place of life" and "living structure." It makes perfect
sense, then, that when Castro introduces Saint James into the mix, the
Saint embodies the traits that it does, and subsequently represents
such a watershed in the trajectory of Spanish history. Indeed, Castro
refers to the saint as Spain's "axis," an entity that propels the
dialectical process of Spain's self-fashioning through the later Middle
Ages and into modernity.xviii At the crux of Castro's idea of Saint
James is the Saint's embodiment of a "theobiosis."xix Constituting
belief in the Saint is an amalgamation of folkloric, pagan spiritual
tradition, Christian creed, and Muslim influence. The Galician
people's instigation of this theobiosis is a product of what had
transpired in their "dwelling place," isolated by circumstance from the
rest of Christendom, and solidified by their active opposition to the
objective and extra-personal religious forms that made up Christianity
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in the broader European context of the ninth century.xx On one end of
this theobiosis is a lingering pagan spirituality that campesinos had
preserved in the relatively isolated frontier society of Visigothic
Iberia, what was a vestige of the Peninsula's Roman days. On another
end is the recent, and overwhelming colonial presence of the Muslims
that rapidly brought on the desolation of the Visigothic political
administration in the early-eighth century, and became thoroughly
saturated in the Iberian "dwelling place" by the ninth. On yet another
end of the theobiosis is the uniquely Galician form of Christianity, a
personalized and indomitable belief that resulted from the precarious
situation of a constant confrontation with Muslim expansion.xxi
Effectively it is a direct consequence of Galicia's structural
circumstances, their "dwelling place," that Saint James, the expression
of Galicia's "living structure," takes on the peculiar traits that he does.
Before further detail of Castro's Saint James is presented, it must
be emphasized that these broader concepts composing Castro's
representation of the Saint are directly related to his theoretical
framework of history. Castro reminds his readers of the quality of his
synthesis not as a manipulation of mere historical events, but as a
consideration of the "vital points of view, the feelings of a people as
they faced the world around them."xxii The unique qualities of the
Spanish people came into their own through Christian Iberia's
existential crisis, precipitated by the conditions of life in a frontier
society, ridden with violence, and composed of various ethnoreligious groups interacting on both peaceful and militant terms. This
existential condition, as Castro sees it, takes form via the dialectic
between morada vital and vividura, both the essences that eventually
determine Spain's peculiar habits and manners of existing.xxiii And
again, unique to Spain is the circumstance of convivencia, the
umbrella term that encompasses all of these processes, and in the
ninth century materializes in the theobiotic figure of Saint James.
Castro describes the pagan element of Saint James as constituting
an important place in the rise to eminence of James' cult. While the
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Daniel Blanchard
belief that James was the son of Zebedee, a fisherman from Bethsaida,
became orthodox by the thirteenth century, as the Castilian poet
Gonzalo de Berceo's Poema de Fernán González illustrates, it was
held in popular Galician tradition in the early Middle Ages that James
was actually a brother of Jesus.xxiv This belief came from: one, the
legacy of the Dioscuri which had survived in Spanish folklore, and
two, a misreading of the Gospel of Matthew, which addressed James
as the brethren of the "carpenter's son" (Matt. 13:55). With respect to
the latter conflation, Castro explains the verse was no doubt not meant
to be taken literally, but it was because of the lingering essence of the
former that theologians in Christian Iberia were so willing to
extrapolate the message of the scripture to its status quo in Galicia in
the early Middle Ages.xxv The Dioscuri were in Roman and Greek
belief the twin sons of Jupiter, Castor and Pollux, militant equestrian
gods frequently depicted in classical art as riding white horses into
battle. Numerous parallels may be drawn between the two cults, such
as the belief that one brother, Castor in the pagan tradition, “ascended
to heaven while the other remained on earth (at least for some time) as
a protector of man."xxvi To juxtapose James' relationship with Jesus in
the popular belief of the early cult of Saint James shows clearly a
similarity between the two traditions.
In Castro's view, the adamant belief among Spanish Christians
that Saint James was a brother of Jesus was only able to reach such
profundity because of the second element composing the Saint's
theobiosis: the Muslim invasion. "If Spain had not been submerged by
Islam," Castro says, "the cult of Santiago of Galicia would not have
prospered."xxvii It is to say, if the Christians had not been conquered
by the Muslims, they would not have learned how to conquer the
Muslims in return. This dominance required the centralization of the
belief of the Hispano-Christian people in an entity like Saint James,
who is, to Castro, a "counter-Mohammed."xxviii As Mohammed had
inspired the Islamic conquest of the Peninsula, Saint James served a
similar role as inspiration for "reconquest."xxix Such a notion echoes
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the previous discussion of Castro's understanding of "dwelling place"
and "living structure." The Saint, embodying classical tropes that had
existed in the belief of the people for hundreds of years, syncretized
with the Muslim tradition of a strong concentration of belief on a
militant and prophetic figure in the form a uniquely Spanish
Christianity: precociously militant and composed of various syncretic
elements. This theobiosis, in Castro's view, made up the new "living
structure" of Spanishness, and it would constitute Christian mores on
the Peninsula throughout the Middle Ages.
Most crucial to Castro's idea of Saint James is its implications
within his philosophy of history, because his treatment of the Saint
entails more than simply identifying its syncretic elements. For
Castro, the belief in Saint James is vitally connected to the Spanish
essence. Again, he describes the nature of this essence on the basis of
existential philosophy. "Out of the belief in Santiago grows a most
original type of existence," explains Castro.xxx The belief, a kind of ex
machina perspective of the Saint, comes to determine the way of life,
the "living structure," of the Spanish people.xxxi This structure is the
militant framework that constituted Spanish society in the Middle
Ages. At the same time the belief in Saint James defines the "dwelling
place" of Spanish existence. Deeds are expressed in cultural
manifestations, which take the form of "works of anguished beauty
(from Cervantes to Unamuno), in which life appears as it is, as a
problem."xxxii The same existential crisis Unamuno speaks of in the
twentieth century, this "uncertainty" and "living in a state of alarm
caused by doubt," permeates with the Spanish people's anxiety about
their origins, their place within their multi-cultural structure of
life.xxxiii Saint James thus is an expression of an irrational and
instinctive process. This framework is the philosophy of history in
which Castro views the cult of Saint James.
However much credence one can viably put in the empirical
evidence Castro uses to back his argument, it is important to
remember that his idea of history is not necessarily based on a system
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Daniel Blanchard
of "logical reason."xxxiv He writes, "History, that is to say, the integral
life of a peoples, is not a sequence of 'events,' isolable by means of
logical abstractions."xxxv "History does not take place in a vacuum but
in the life of a people."xxxvi For understanding Spanish history, it is
not whether the reader objectively agrees with the evidence of the
faith in Saint James, the critical process of a rational inquirer. Rather,
the understanding is hinged on grasping the existential reality of the
Spanish people, one undeniably immersed in a kind of irrational and
illogical belief. Castro describes this belief as a matter of life or death
for the Spanish. "Peoples incapable of dying for a faith have never
attained a complete reality," he says.xxxvii This is the kind of belief the
Muslims of Iberia clung to, and the kind the Christians learned to own
as well. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of," quotes Castro,
reminding his readers that the dream of a people, when "integrated
into the total existence of millions," is a reality, and "reality is a
dream."xxxviii
Historians must understand that Castro operated within the
context of a unique philosophy of history. His concepts, such as his
idea of Saint James, are qualified within his own way of viewing
history. This is because the theoretical elements composing his
philosophy determine his representation of historical phenomena, just
as it has been demonstrated with Castro's analysis of the rise of the
cult of Saint James. In the end, the solution is to do one of two things.
Either historians critique Castro within the context of his philosophy
of history, or they cease to invoke him as an icon of previous
distortions of historicity in the field. The twentieth century produced a
range of scholars that have been categorized similarly to Don
Américo. This group was not unique to Spain, not even to Europe,
especially as colonial administrations produced contexts of oppression
throughout the world similar to those of the Franco regime. All were
intellectual obstructions, and for scholars such as Castro, all were
mires that issued a higher calling for the expression of an oppressed
people in existential terms, which, perhaps, allowed for the closest
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idea of reality attainable. The literature stemming from these
circumstances deserves to be considered within its own context, on its
own terms. Doing so will not only strengthen the revisionary
scholarship that is to come; it will also work toward rooting out the
hypocrisy of a Western age that claims to have realized the allinclusive democracy, but still refuses to understand its oppressive past
on the terms of the literary expressions of its subjects.
In his 1960 text Saint James in Spain, T.D. Kendrick reminisced
about the Spanish national holiday, El día de Santiago, describing the
atmosphere of the festivities. "When the bells are ringing," writes
Kendrick, "and the rockets are hissing and banging, and inside the
cathedral the tapers are lit and the air is heavy with incense, then,
when, with the gently hesitant dignity of the litter-borne image,
Santiago, on his fine horse and with his flashing sword, moves in
procession among his people, even the most incredulous of us might
fittingly pay this blood-thirsty image a discreet act of homage. After
all, Santiago Matamoros has worked wonders in Spanish hearts."xxxix
Little would Kendrick have known that Castro would die twelve years
later, "swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, in the little Catalonian
resort town of Lloret de Mar," on the Día de Santiago, July 25, 1972.xl
Rubia Barcia has already commented on the coincidental date of
Castro's death. For a historian who emphasized so adamantly Saint
James' role in determining the Spanish living experience, it only
seems appropriate to have passed away in the midst of the essence of
what El día de Santiago represented.
Notes
i
Albert A. Sicroff, "Castro and His Critics: Eugenio Asensio," Hispanic
Review 40, no. 1 (1972): 30, www.jstor.org/stable/471967.
ii
Sicroff, "Castro and His Critics," 1.
iii
Kenneth Baxter Wolf, "Convivencia in Medieval Spain: A Brief History of
an Idea," Religion Compass 3, no. 1 (2009): 74, cf. Peter Linehan, History and the
Historians of Medieval Spain (New York: Oxford, 1993), 15.
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Daniel Blanchard
iv
José Rubia Barcia, "What's in a Name: Américo Castro (y Quesada)," in
Américo Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization, eds. José Rubia Barcia
and Selma Margaretten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 18.
v
Américo Castro, Santiago de España (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1958),
15, my translation.
vi
Américo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, trans. Edmund L. King
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 5 n. 2.
vii
Ibid., 24.
viii
Ibid., 25.
ix
Ibid.
x
Ibid.
xi
Ibid.
xii
Ibid., 32.
xiii
Ibid., 33.
xiv
Ibid.
xv
Ibid.
xvi
Ibid., 82.
xvii
Ibid., 83.
xviii
Ibid., 79.
xix
Ibid., 131.
xx
Ibid., 127.
xxi
Ibid., 126.
xxii
Ibid., 127.
xxiii
Ibid.
xxiv
Ibid., 131.
xxv
Ibid.
xxvi
Ibid.
xxvii
Ibid.
xxviii
Ibid., 151.
xxix
Ibid., 149.
xxx
Ibid., 131.
xxxi
Ibid., 183.
xxxii
Ibid.
xxxiii
Ibid., 25.
xxxiv
Ibid., 5 n. 2.
xxxv
Ibid., 147.
xxxvi
Ibid., 157.
xxxvii
Ibid., 147.
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xxxviii
xxxix
Ibid.
T.D. Kendrick, St. James in Spain (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1960),
200.
xl
Rubia Barcia, "What's in a Name," 20.
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Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization, edited by José Rubia Barcia
and Selma Margaretten, 3–22. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Castro, Américo. The Structure of Spanish History. Translated by Edmund L. King.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954.
—. Santiago de España. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1958.
Kendrick, T.D. St. James in Spain. London: Methuen, 1960.
Linehan, Peter. History and the Historians of Medieval Spain. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993.
Pi-Sunyer, Oriol. "The Historiography of Américo Castro: An Anthropological
Interpretation." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 49, no. 1 (1972): 40–50.
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no. 1 (1972): 1–30. www.jstor.org/stable/471967.
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